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Jesse Marchant is a Swiss-Canadian multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter and record producer based in New York City. He has recorded 4 studio albums and an EP, Brightest of Feathers. His most recently completed LP Illusion of Love will be released in January of 2018.

Jesse Brian Marchant was born in Montreal, Canada on January 29th 1981 to a Swiss mother and Canadian father. He began classical guitars lessons at age 7 and attended a French Lycée for elementary and high school. He is fluent in English, French and Swiss-German. Jesse attended McGill University, majoring in Civil Engineering and then Finance, before dropping out in his last semester. Marchant moved to New York City in 2001 and has lived in the United States since.

Jesse wrote songs for his first album while living in Los Angeles from 2003-2007. Not Even in July was recorded in Hudson, NY at Henry Hirsch’s church studio, in the fall of 2008 and released on Partisan Records in the spring of 2010, subsequent to his self-releasing it in 2009.
Marchant has produced or co-produced all of his records and performed many of the recordings himself. Stray Ashes was engineered and performed by Marchant alone, in a rented great lodge in N. Argyle, NY.
Bass was later added by Macy Taylor with additional drumming by Makenzie Smith. The album was mixed by Grammy-Winning producer John Congleton and released on Western Vinyl in 2012. Marchant's album's since have been engineered, mixed and co-produced D. James Goodwin, and released on Marchant's No Other label.

Marchant has completed numerous headline tours of the US and Canada, in addition to national support slots for the Mercury Prize-Winning group Alt-J, Other Lives, Nathaniel Rateliff, Sondre Lerche, Rogue Wave, Cloud Cult, Heartless Bastards, Local Natives, AA Bondy, Damien Jurado, among others.

Marchant’s songs have been featured on many Emmy Award-Winning shows, including Gray’s Anatomy, Parenthood, Shameless, The Blacklist, Eyewitness, Bones, Hawaii-5-0, Elementary, etc.

For his self-titled record marchant produced a video trilogy starring Amanda Seyfried and Christopher Abbott. The series was directed by Houmam Abdallah, with cinematography by Zack Galler, filmed on
Location in the desert of 29 Palms. The parts were premiered by Entertainment Weekly and Buzzfeed. Abdallah also directed a video for Marchant’s Only Now, filmed on location in Loch Ness, Scotland, which
was premiered by Nowness. His first video off Illusion of Love, for the song Sister, I was directed by Brady Corbet, whose first film
won 2 Golden Lions at the 2015 Venice International Film Festival. The video features sky-writing by the stunt pilot Nathan Hammond.

A commitment. An adventure. A journey. People use these words all the time in relation to marriage, in vows and explanations and elegies. So, too, do husband and wife Ryan Peoples and Rebekah Goode-Peoples of Atlanta’s Oryx & Crake. Though, chances are, they mean it in a totally different way.

“There’s a beast in me/and I know you know this,” Ryan sings on “Strange as You Are,” the opener of the band’s latest album, Marriage. But knowing and seeing are two different things entirely, and Oryx & Crake make hay of the tension that lies between the two, loading on Patterson Hood’s “duality of the Southern thing,” abandoned religion and nods to more than one of the great post-apocalyptic novels of our time for good measure. Ostensibly, Marriage is about commitment — in a broad sense, not just between romantic partners — but it’s even bigger than that. Marriage is also about ambivalence.

For an album to tackle such big and slippery themes, it almost has to be cinematic, and in that regard, Oryx & Crake do not disappoint. Marriage displays the grandeur of Arcade Fire’s finer moments with the lyrical and emotional heft of Sufjan Steven’s more personal cuts. Tracks like “The World Will Take Care of Me” show off the group’s range, beginning with nothing but a voice and a guitar and gradually sneaking inlayer after layer of sound, creating a sense of something rich and organic, which permeates the album.

Crafted in the Goode-Peoples home over the course of four years (and blooming with little intimate Easter eggs, like a recording of their friends singing at a Christmas party, or the voices of their children), Marriage sounds much bigger than the rooms it was made in. This is thanks in large part to strings from Matt Jarrard (cello) and Karyn Lu (violin), as well as Ryan’s sound designer tinkerings with audio both “found” around the house and created.

Such big sounds, themes and richness of detail could have made the record sag under its own weight. But Rebekah — who did her masters work in epics — helped give it structure in the well-worn fashion of the classics. The songs, like the epics, move in cycles — from the first blush of a thrilling new thing to the “underworld moment” of “The Well”’s dirge-like crawl to the woozy singing saw and blistered toes of closer “The Road,” which tips its hat at — who else? — Cormac McCarthy.

The album art, by Bo Bartlett, is the perfect visual representation of the multi-layered themes on Marriage. On the front, in “Car Crash,” a couple embraces beside a crunched and overturned car, under an ochre sky. On the back is that painting’s equal and not-quite-opposite, “A Miraculous Outcome.” It’s exactly the same scene, only now the sky is blue and fairly clear. It’s “The Well” versus “The Road,” two sides of a coin that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever stuck it out – whatever “it” is.

It’s not the kind of journey that looks great on TV. But it’s an important one. Because it’s real.